JUNE - 2019CONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM 19There has been a lot chatter recently about "circadian lighting" accompanied by a huge marketing push by manufactures to promote their latest and great-est tech. Applications aren't limited to the built en-vironment, with apps on our handheld devices and computer monitors that shift hue to limit the impact to our circadian system as well personal devices that measure and track our light exposure. "Happy lights" have been used as treatment to counteract the impacts of Seasonal Affective Disorder and its lesser cousin Winter Blues. There is a stark disconnect between the environments we evolved and the environments we live in today. Humans alter our environment at a pace that our physiology cannot match. If we consider the transition to dense urban environments over the past couple hundred years and how this fits within the geologic time frame of millions of years, we are within merely a sliver of time within our evolutionary history. It takes more than a sliver of time for our physiology to adapt to new environments and then spread those adaptions across the gene pool.Our ancestors rose with sun and daily activity ceased as the sun set; firelight allowed us to be active into the night. They were routinely exposed to the brightness of the day and the daily and seasonal variability of the equatorial regions of our heritage. In modern society, we rise prior to the sun, spend our commute in carsor underground trains, enter a dimly lit building where we stay for eight or more hours, and then commute home in relative darkness where we stay up late exposed to light generated by our various technological devices. This pattern equates to Americans spending as much as 93 percent of our time indoors in environments that are not supportive of our body's needs. There are both chronic and acute implications to the absent relationship with the sun and its life supporting light. Light is the primary cue that synchronizes our body clock to local time and being out of synch has been shown to increase the occurrence of breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, depression, cardiovascular diseaseand stress. Acutely, inappropriate light exposure can result in poor sleep, ill moods, and reduction of overall productivity.A basic understanding of the mechanism of the circadian system can help cut through the marketing noise to find the By Edward Clark, Director, CIRCA DIESLEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY TO PROVIDE NATURAL CUES IN SUPPORT OF OCCUPANT WELLNESSEdward ClarkCXO INSIGHTS
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